Halloween 3. Stupid? Or Advanced?

Halloween 3. Stupid? Or Advanced?

Oct 21

Getting home late last night, I find Halloween 3 is playing on Space (the Canadian answer to the Sci-Fi Channel). Always happy to have something mindless to watch before bed, I watched. It didn’t take long for it to break bad. Here, watch the trailer:

Crap, that’s no help. OK, I’ll summarize – After two go-rounds with Michael Myers, arguably THE movie monster of the second half of the 20th century, the makers of Halloween 3 had a radical idea… make a sequel and NOT have Myers in it. Buh? And then after realizing they greenlit a sequel without the star monster, execs panicked and insisted that the movie have some sort of monster. With the flip of a coin, they agreed on robots. I shit you not.

Basically – spoiler alert… does anyone care? – there are some murders, and Dr. Dan Challis (Tom Atkins – you’d know him if you saw him), who is investigating said murders, discovers that it has something to do with these super popular Halloween masks all the kids are buying (like in a nation of children, not one went, “Hell no, I want to be TJ Hooker!” (the movie is from 1982, FYI)) and as he gets too close to the truth, a guy that’s actually a robot tries to take him out. No fooling.

With pieces of the puzzle still missing, he goes after the maker of the masks, Silver Shamrock Novelties – ok, so, also, there’s a young lady (I’m not sure where she came from, I missed a couple of parts) and they both get captured, and the guy that runs the place reveals his plans – he’s a witch! And he’s going back to old-school, Hollywood witch values and intends to kill millions of kids using the masks.

In the thesaurus, under “sheer simplicity – antonyms” it says, “See Halloween 3.”

You ready for more?

Right, so bad guy is a witch and he’s spent his entire life striving to achieve the singleminded goal of setting up a nation-wide TV contest, where kids tune in at 9PM on Halloween and find out who wins. The TV broadcast will trigger the masks, which will kill the wearer in a lot of improbable and gory ways. Shock, spiders, snakes n shit.

So the hero, as you’d expect, busts out, rescues the girl, disables all the bad guy’s robot army of retro-looking dudes, which pisses off (I’m assuming, thanks to the missed parts again) a wiccan god or something, and the bad guy is fried BY mystical energy. Then our heroes make a run for it in an attempt to warn the world, this being Halloween, of course, and the clock is ticking.

OK, so while driving, the girl attacks Dan, because she’s a robot. Maybe replaced? Was she all along? I dunno (again, mental reel missing), but it’s stupid anyhow. The robot then proceeds to attack the only way she knows how – grab him by the throat. They crash and an arm is ripped off. He gets out. She attacks, grabbing him by the throat with the remaining arm. He smashes her head off and gets in car, whereupon the ripped-off arm grabs him by the throat! He gets out, kills it, and throws it away. Worst investigator ever.

THEN THE DECAPITATED BODY ATTACKS HIM… BY TRYING TO GRAB HIM BY THE THROAT! He totally wails on it… and runs away. Doesn’t take the arm as some sort of, I dunno, proof of his admittedly crazy story. He doesn’t lock the remains of the robot body in the truck, for later retrieval. The dummy. He just runs down the road, desperate to find that phone, which is when he comes across a gas station.

And this is where, against all logic and reason, the movie freaks me the fuck out, and there’s maybe three minutes left.

Dr. Dan gets on the phone, calls Someone In Charge, and begs them to stop the broadcast, now only minutes away. Call it a bomb hoax he says, but just delay it. Three kids come out of nowhere, this being the countryside, to trick or treat. The total crap nature of the movie’s logic continues, even here, but it’s mostly forgivable. Country kids need candy too. All are wearing The Masks (none of which are Mike Myers-style Shatner masks, strangely. An easy nod to the first films that they totally skipped).

One child walks to the station’s TV, which begins to play the contest broadcast – Tom is begging into the phone when the station changes – “Technical difficulties.” The kid changes the channel and…

…let me stop for a moment. In 1982, most TVs were analog, something that will be long gone by January of 2009. And they had exactly three channels in the states, as there were only three networks. So, bear that in mind for a moment.

The kid changes the channel and the broadcast is still going – Tom looks tense, and it too changes to “technical difficulties.” Again the kid changes the channel – last one, remember – and the killer broadcast enters into the deadly phase. I can keep describing it, but I think it would be better if you just watch – the only thing to keep in mind is that the end of the YouTube clip is the hard cut to the end credits of the film. This is literally the last of the movie.

For all its suck, if you buy into that one premise for a moment, that a million kids are at risk, and after all he’s gone through, one station won’t stop playing it and his brain starts to breakdown. They’re all going to die. The kid in front of him serves a beautiful function, as we also have to accept that he’s seconds away from watching the kids in front of him die, and that he didn’t lessen the deaths by getting two stations off the air, since the kid at the station demonstrates what all kids would do… simply change the channel.

I don’t know what to say, other than the ending hit me like a rock to the skull. I don’t expect stuff like that in general and having been completely put off guard by the preceding effluence, I was stunned.

The staging, while a little improbable (did those kids drive there themselves? oh well), as mentioned, serves an amazingly elegant function. And pacing is tight and builds fantastically. And the commercial, with it’s jangly jingle, builds and builds and builds, combining with the editing to pull you into Tom’s situation immediately. 99.5% of that movie should be studied as an example of what not to do in a movie. And that final three minutes is the perfect example of what to do.

(sigh) The final three minutes of Halloween 3: Season of the Witch deserved a better movie.